Memory Hold-The-Door by John Buchan — Read

To anyone whose imagination has been caught by ancient Rome one picture must keep recurring. It is the living-room of a country house -- farm or villa -- in which, among objects of domestic use, a space was reserved for the images of the dead. I do not mean the grandiose _lararium_ of the rich, but the modest household where there was no room to segregate the family busts. I picture those wax memorials, often rude and discoloured, lit by the glow of the hearth-fire when the storm howled without, catching the sun on a bright morning, and drawing the wondering eyes of the children when an elder spoke of the past and jerked a thumb upwards towards some ancestor. In such a life the dead remained in a real sense within the family circle. Piety was nourished not by the memory only but by the eye.

So among these chapters it may be permitted to allot one to the pictures which, as we grow older, acquire a sharper outline than the contemporary scene -- those family recollections which are the first, and also, I think, the last, things in a man's memory. As one ages, the memory seems to be inverted and recent events to grow dim in the same proportion as ancient happenings become clear. To-day, for instance, I am a little hazy about the Great War but very clear about the South African campaign. And I seem to live more intimately with those who died long ago than with men and women whom I see every day. Lockhart's lines are less a precept for conduct than the recognition of a fact in human psychology: